Perhaps the most surprising part of Yakuza Kiwami 3’s announcement had nothing to do with Yakuza Kiwami 3. It was when Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio announced that, in addition to an up-rezzed redo of the third Yakuza, it was going to release an entire bonus Gaiden game as well: Dark Ties, starring Y3 bad guy Yoshitaka Mine.
I’ve played a little Dark Ties, and it’s good fun going absolutely ham on the unsuspecting punks of Kamurocho as Mine, but there was almost a world where we would never have gotten to play him at all. RGG’s original plan was for the Dark Ties’ story to be, uh, basically a video they bundled onto the Kiwami 3 disc.
It was “something that could be viewed like a video,” Kiwami 3 and Dark Ties director Ryosuke Horii recently told Famitsu (translated by Automaton). So, you know, DarkTies.mp4 in other words. Thankfully, the devs at RGG realised it’d be much cooler if you actually got to step into Mine’s immaculate Florsheims.
Making Mine playable was, says Horii, “the best way to tell his story,” which is a very game developer response to the question, ‘Why did you make this a videogame?’
But Yakuza producer Hiroyuki Sakamoto points out there are other reasons RGG might fancy making a Mine game: the fans love that guy, and Sakamoto points out that he regularly makes the series’ top five most popular characters among fans. Giving them a shot to actually play as the guy feels like a slam dunk, and RGG felt like its last chance to do so was Kiwami 3.
I’m looking forward to playing more. From my brief time with Mine, he sure as heck ain’t Kiryu, or even Majima when we played him back in Yakuza 0. He’s a barely repressed geyser of rage whose moral compass maybe doesn’t quite point true north.
“Mine is not a character with a strong sense of justice. Even in the sub-stories, he doesn’t interact with people in a way that is based on the idea of ’defeating evil and protecting the weak,'” says Horii.
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